Relationship between pair-wise and MC/DC testing: Initial experimental results

Abstract

While pair-wise testing has shown a high level of fault detection in many situations, it has not done so for testing logical expressions in software applications. The modified condition/decision coverage (MC/DC) approach was especially developed for testing logical expressions, but test generation according to this approach can be complicated and time-consuming. From a practical point of view, combining pair-wise and MC/DC testing would integrate the benefits of both approaches; however, this would require solving many research problems. As an initial step in this direction, our paper evaluates the level of MC/DC coverage for pair-wise test cases in different situations and compares this level to MC/DC coverage for random test cases. To confirm this, we conducted experimental testing of logical expressions of different sizes, complexities, and numbers of input variables. Our experimental results show that the pair-wise test cases had a higher level of MC/DC coverage compared to the random test cases, achieving more than 70% MC/DC coverage. This allows us to suggest pair-wise testing as a promising method to be used as the basis for MC/DC test generation.